First Rider's Call
Page 131

Yet, I still see in Alessandros the boy who adopted me, a low-born nobody living off garbage in the streets, to be his best friend, an affiliation that allowed me to live in luxury as a gentleman, attend the best schools, and enter the military at an officer’s rank. I never wanted for anything, and all Alessandros asked for in return was for my affection and support. I believe that’s all he still wants.
As we grew up, we were inseparable, our lives irrevocably entwined. They still are, and so I am tainted. The boy who I used to play ball with, or go hunting with, has just shown me a harp made by a famous craftsman and presented to Varadgrim. It is a beautiful thing, the most beautiful such instrument I have ever seen or heard. Yet, it was not good enough for Varadgrim. So Alessandros “improved” it by stealing the voices of Eletians, and binding them to the strings. Now the harp is unearthly, filling the chamber with the voices of God’s angels.
The Eletians who lost their voices are dying. For them, losing the ability to sing is like losing their spirit.
I no longer know Alessandros. He is not the same man I once loved as my closest friend and confidant.
TOWER OF THE HEAVENS
Alton moved in dreams. Dreams of dark, tangled branches and burning, of vast empty spaces. Karigan came to him during his moments of deepest despair, ethereal in her ivory gown, whispering to him in loving words, only to melt away into something hideous and terrifying. He writhed in fever, sometimes awakening to nothingness, and total dark.
During one such awareness, he felt around him with hands shaking from illness. He was on a stone floor, not the damp mossy earth of his dreams. It was cool and seemed to moderate his fever. He pressed his cheek to the stone, thinking he remembered something of a tower, of entering it. If it was so, he was safe. He was out of the forest and safe.
This time when he slept, the nightmares did not return, but the dreams were still strange. They were of talking to stone, and of a beat that swelled up from the floor and pulsed through his body.
Sometime later, awareness came again. He lay on his back, gazing up at the starlit heavens. He frowned in consternation, thinking he was supposed to be in a tower of stone. The floor was still beneath him, and he did not hear the usual sounds of night or feel a breeze, or the damp of dew. His fevered mind must have affected his senses.
He groped about himself and found a column of stone to sit against. The new position made him dizzy and nauseous, and he gasped and retched. When the illness passed, he used the column to haul himself to his feet. Sharp pains shot through his hip and legs, but he managed to remain upright.
The column, it turned out, was a waist-high pedestal. He groped the top of it, his hands gliding across a smooth stone embedded into its surface. Green lightning crackled within it, then softened to a steady glow, tinting Alton’s skin a pale green. It did little to illuminate his surroundings.
“It is about time, Orla,” a voice said out of the darkness.
Startled, Alton steadied himself against the pedestal, fear darting to the ends of his nerves.
“Did you take all this time to plot your next move, or have you been cheating again?” The voice, impossible to pinpoint, reverberated around him in what felt like a vast chamber.
Alton peered into the dark, trying to discern this new threat.
“Why are we sitting in the dark, Orla?”
“Hello?” Alton ventured.
A long moment passed before the voice, rather peeved, spoke again. “You’re not Orla.”
“Um, no. I’m Alton.”
Miraculously, and with startling intensity, golden sunshine showered down on him, and he blinked rapidly to allow his eyes to adjust. He discovered he stood on a plain of rolling hills and grasses.
“What?”
Had he been transported to someplace else, or was this more of his feverish dreaming? Beneath his feet were blocks of stone patterned into concentric circles that looped outward before vanishing into the grasses. To either side of him were stone arches that led nowhere, but rather framed the horizon. Fluted columns encircled the area, supporting nothing on their scrolled capitals but the sky.
Nearby, an old man with long, drooping white whiskers, sipping at a cup of tea, sat at a table regarding Alton with some curiosity. At his elbow was a game of Intrigue draped in cobwebs.
Alton took in his surroundings, the feathery clouds stretched across the sky, and the sun warming his face. The silvery-green grasses of the plain rustled and bent in the light wind.
“Where am I?”
“Haethen Toundrel, boy, where else?”
A familiar name among much that was unfamiliar. “Tower of the Heavens . . .”
“Indeed.”
It was unlike any tower Alton had ever been in. “I—I don’t understand . . .”
The old man made an impatient noise. “What better way to view the heavens, boy, than from a wide open plain?”
“Then I’m not in the tower?”
“This is Tower of the Heavens.”
The old man said no more as if this were explanation enough. Alton supposed logic existed in his words somewhere—the odd sort of disconnected logic one found only in dreams.
“And you,” Alton said to the old man, “who are you? Some kind of ghost?”
The old man snorted in derision. “I am no such thing. I am Merdigen, great mage and guardian. Er, a magical projection of Merdigen, anyway. Far more sophisticated and useful than a mere specter.”
“You’re not . . . real?”
Merdigen sputtered on his tea. “Not real? I am a real projection of the great mage Merdigen.”